PRESS: Russian crt arrests shares of 4 SMARTS unit on MTS’s claim

MOSCOW, Jan 18 (PRIME) -- The Arbitration Court of the Samara Region has arrested shares of four units of local telecom operator SMARTS within proceedings of a London court of a claim filed by Russian mobile operator MTS, willing to buy these assets, business daily Kommersant reported Monday.

The Samara court satisfied an application of Telekom-Povolzhye, a unit of MTS, and arrested shares of the four SMARTS units.

At the end of December 2015, the High Court of Justice of England and Wales also arrested these assets on a lawsuit filed by Telekom-Povolzhye.

Lawyers said it was a test case that a Russian court agreed to arrest assets on the lawsuit studied by an international commercial arbitrage.

MTS went to court because under an agreement dated December 30, 2014, it was to buy 100% of shares of the four assets from SMARTS’ founder Gennady Kiryushin, but the deal did not take place.

Telekom-Povolzhye asked the domestic court to settle the dispute, because it was impossible to fulfil the London court’s decision. MTS’s unit preliminarily estimated losses from violation of the agreement by the seller and the deal’s failure at U.S. $35 million.

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